The multi-genre structure of J. Metham's poem “Amoryus and Cleopes” (1449) and bestiary motifs in the “encyclopedic” episode of its plot

Abstract

The subject of research in this article is a multi-genre composition, and the research material is the medieval English poem “Amoryus and Cleopes”, underestimated by modern literary criticism: essays by English researchers about it are extremely few, and works by foreign researchers, apparently, are completely absent; in the 108 years since its first publication, it was published once again in Middle English, but was never translated not only into other languages, but also into modern English. There are also no scholars specializing in the work of its author, the mid-15th century writer John Metham. Meanwhile, this is definitely an interesting work, since it varies the plot from the Fourth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and its creator copies Ovid’s material not mechanically, but quite creatively, including it in a genre- and stylistically variegated composition of plot episodes. In the process of research, we identified the boundaries of these episodes and focused attention on one of them, within the framework of which the poet Metem put into the heroine’s speech a lot of information of the “encyclopedic” type, obviously gleaned from various bestiaries and works of medieval zoologists. Our goal was to identify motifs transferred into the poem from the most famous of these works. Along the way, Metham's verse forms were described, and his free handling of the Chaucerian heptath used in the poem was revealed. Our article shows that the traditional attitude to the 15th century as a “barren age” is not entirely justified and that between the death of Chaucer and Lydgate and the appearance of the Scottish “Chaucerians” at the end of the century, there were English authors with an original style and works with individual poetic features.